Review of Nicole Aschoff, The New Prophets of Capital (Verso Books, 2015)

Storytelling is important to humans. Storytelling is equally as important to capitalism. In her new book Nicole Ashoff examines the elite in in our society and the stories they tell. She calls them, as the title suggests, “The New Prophets of Capital.”

Many people go to jobs they don’t like and produce things that don’t improve human life. Nicole Aschoff asserts – and I am inclined to agree with her – that this is a strange way to organize society.

By Barry Finger Review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2014)

French economist Thomas Piketty’s latest book, which first appeared in 2013 and was published in English in 2014, has stimulated a great deal of much-needed debate about the ever-growing level of social inequality in contemporary capitalism. It has certainly encouraged liberals, who seek an alternative to austerity policies that they believe might save capitalism from a profound social crisis. At the same time, it has baffled and irritated Marxists and other heterodox economists of the left, who feel the book misdirects our analysis of the nature of capitalist inequality.

This article from the special Indigenous Resurgence issue of New Socialist magazine in 2006 now rings more true than ever. Seven years later, indigenous struggles against the corporate pillaging and desecration of their traditional territories continue in Canada – at the forefront of these is the battle against the Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker route through the northern British Columbian mainland and coastal islands.

Neoliberal globalization has brought with it the intensification of what Marxist geographer David Harvey refers to as accumulation by dispossession [check out Harvey’s 2009 talk on Youtube – Eds].

Europe is now the centre of the global crisis. It is a crisis of the capitalist system, sweeping across Europe and not limited to just one country. The crisis erupted five years ago under governments of both the traditional Left and Right as they all pursued similar neoliberal policies.

This article could begin pretty much anywhere, describing any number of contemporary fads that work to reproduce and reinforce our deeply (hetero)sexist Western norms and behaviours. Girls Gone Wild videos. Toddlers in Tiaras. Playboy bunny-stamped snowboards and cellphone covers. Sex bracelets that signal which sex acts the (inevitably female) wearer is willing to perform. Kiddie-thongs. Thongs.

This article is Part 2 of a 2-part series, and is the basis of a presentation at the Historical Materialism 2012 conference in Toronto [http://www.yorku.ca/hmyork/]. Part 1 can be found here. The authors are both based in the United States, and thus use the term “tribal nations” and American Indians (Indigenous peoples in Canada refer to themselves as “First Nations”). – NSW

The contents of the federal budget unveiled by the Conservatives on March 29, 2012 are hardly shocking. In fact, this voluminous document sheds light on what strategies the Canadian state will be adopting to promote and facilitate capital accumulation in this era of economic stagnation and austerity for the working class.

The claim that economic crises and austerity have an uneven impact on the working class — with the greatest effects being felt by women and children — is one we hear often on the Left. However, with some important exceptions, this claim is all too often just an aside or a footnote.

Humanity is facing a severe and worsening food crisis. Three billion people, nearly half of the world’s population, are malnourished. Over a billion suffer from “continual and severe hunger” while millions die each year because they lack access to even the most minimal amount of food. Every five seconds a child dies due to hunger or hunger-related diseases.